Day 73 One Mile Jetty Heritage Precinct

Today we drove to Babbage Island to see the One Mile Jetty Heritage Precinct. Here we saw the One Mile Jetty Museum, Babbage Island Railway Museum and the Lighthouse Keepers Cottage Museum.

Carnarvon's traditional owners are the Aboriginal Yinggarda people, who named this area long ago, Gwoonwardu, meaning 'neck of water'. The first European settlement was established in 1876 setting up the pastoral station known as “Brickhouse Station”, then it was known as Mungarra Squatting Co.
By 1881 there were several pastoral stations set up, including the well-known Brown’s Range station and the Brockman Station, which led to the region being declared a municipality. Following many requests by the pastoralists for an active port out of the region and better ways to ship their products the Gascoyne Roads Board was set up in 1882 and quickly began plans to develop the economy of the region. Then in 1883 the townsite of Carnarvon was gazetted, taking its name from Henry Howard Molyneux, Fourth Earl of Carnarvon and Colonial Secretary.

The townsite then continued to grow throughout the 1880’s adding additional services and landmarks such as the first postal/telegram service in 1884, the Port Hotel in 1885 and the first school in 1886.
The town and its population would really take off however at the turn of the century with the completion of the Carnarvon Jetty in 1899 and then the gold rush in the early 1900s would see Carnarvon boom into a centre of activity in the region.

In 1904 after the construction of additional tramway bridges, connecting the townsite to the jetty, Carnarvon’s “Mile Jetty” was opened making Carnarvon the boom port town of the area.
With the conclusion of World War 1 there was a shift of focus in the region's industries. With the incoming settlers of the soldier relocation scheme came a boom in horticultural practices including the growing of the now famous bananas and tomatoes all along newly plotted out lands on the banks of the Gascoyne River.

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century this trend would continue, the horticultural growers continued to thrive and grow while the traditional pastoralist and whaling industries would suffer under the effects of the great depression, which would continue in the region until the 1940’s.

In 1941 Carnarvon was put onto the nations map with the sinking of the German raiding vessel “Kormoran” after an engagement with the HMAS Sydney off the coast of the Gascoyne. Many German sailors managed to make it to the shoreline of Quobba Station and were rescued and taken to Carnarvon while they awaited transportation to Fremantle.

The Lock Hospital Tragedy Memorial 'Don't look at the Islands' was installed at the Carnarvon Heritage Precinct on 17 April 2019, marking 100 years since the Lock Hospitals commenced operations of the coast of Carnarvon.




The bronze sculpture, 'Don't look at the Islands' depicts the distress of children whose parents were forcibly taken from them and placed on the islands under the guise of contagious illness.

From 1908 to 1918 many Aboriginal men, women and children, labelled as suffering from venereal disease were collected from areas across the North and North East of Western Australia and transported across to the Lock Hospital set up Islands off Carnarvon’s coast. The women and children were segregated on Dorre Island, and the men on Bernier Island. The hospitals did not provide adequate facilities for the people who were taken there, let alone have any proper treatment to deal with the emotional trauma they experience
because of being forcibly taken there – away from their families and communities and kept in isolation in a foreign environment, while receiving poor treatment. Many people died.

This sculpture of a girl, pointing towards the islands - her hand covering her eyes – unable to even look towards these forlorn places of incarceration and pain, is based on this tragically inspirational story. We have endeavoured to capture the huge depth of the intensity of her forlornness, with this one simple gesture. Her little brother, clinging to the only ‘mother’ figure he has now, expresses the premature responsibility that this young girl will have to face, as his future guardian while, herself, too young to be cut adrift from her extended family who were often situated far away, left behind, when the children followed their parents to Carnarvon.





The Quan Sing family moved to Carnarvon from Derby and bought Donson’s store on the corner of Crowther Street and Olivia Terrace in the early 1930’s. They renamed this the Quan Sing Store. it was originally built in the 1880’s. Winson who was born in Derby in 1920, was the youngest of a family of 10 and his mother died when he was 14. Kinverns (Lanky) the eldest brother at 32, took over the running of the store with the help of his brothers Kinton (Ken) and Winson. Lanky died in 1953 and Winson bought the store. Up to this time it had been a vibrant local general store, with curios from bygone years, which had intrigued its customers.












We then drove to see Dawson's Burrowing Bees, known locally as Mungurragurra or Moogadgurrah in the Yinggarda language, are some of Australia's largest native bees and are only found in the Gascoyne Region. They do not have a queen or live in shared hives, but individual females dig their own subterranean nests close together in the red claypans.

They create small chambers for their young, carefully stocking each one with pollen and nectar collected from surrounding wildflowers. On warm, sunny days you'll notice them hovering just above the ground before disappearing into what looks like tiny holes in the sand. They cluster in their thousands and can only be seen for a couple of months a year. They do not make honey.

Luckily they do not sting so we were able to get close to the burrows to take some photos whilst hundreds flew around us, just an amazing experience. They were so quick it was really difficult to photograph them.